Friday, July 23, 2004

Make it stop! (pound) Make it stop! (pound) Make it stop! (pound): Microsoft to hire 3,000 in area. I'm going to have to order another poster from despair.com to cover the hole in the drywall my forehead just made.

5 comments:

Anonymous
said...

Perhaps you should make some room for one of the newcomers by laying yourself off? Face it; your anger and resentment are getting the better of you.

Perhaps you should also ask yourself how well your behavior on this site is aligning with the values and ethics so many of us at Microsoft are working so hard for everyday. Realizing potential is not just about customers – it’s about us as well.

Imagine dedicating a similar amount of energy towards developing sub-par performers to achieve higher levels of performance. How much would this influence the bottom line?

I believe many of your posts smack of the inward turning, proto-paranoid, elitism that we’ve often been accused of and it totally turns me off. From my perspective, this way of running one’s business and living one’s life is vulgar and self defeating.

Also, I find some of your choices for cuts rather amusing. They’re virtually all the areas of the business that hold the greatest promise for growth. As history has demonstrated with Windows, Word, Excel, and our visual developer tools, all of which lost money initially, big pay-offs can take time. I’m really glad you’re not running this company.

Ed - thanks for your excellent comment. Wow, them's some words, all-right! Maybe I do need to set-up that therapist visit after all...

Okay, you know, the focus on this blog is about making Microsoft have less employees, and that's not all Teddy-bears and hugs. You bet I engage in positive development where appropriate and worth it. This isn't a blog about hugs and "Oh, you can do better!"

What I'm focused on here is being open that Microsoft just plain has some folks we need to shed ourselves of. Of course you first try to develop them. But you've got to draw the line, and groups are not drawing the line. Rather, they either continue to let that person linger in their fixed 3.0 bucket (which does make some things easier come review time) or happily help them move on to another group.

After moving people on, the next question is: do we really need all these people? And can we hire so many excellent people without beginning to lower the bar? Given how hard it is to hire good people for Microsoft (just a dozen) I can't see how we're going to find 3,000 for the Redmond area.

We are experiencing our own bubble. Far better doing our own strategic management of that bubble now than having to go through our own big pop.

Here is the graph I want to see - HR employees per MS employee over the last 10 years. I remember seeing some data quite a few years ago that showed the growth rate of HR was double the growth rate of the overall company.

Disclaimer

These are sole individual personal points-of-view and the posts and comments by the participants in no way represent the official point-of-view of Microsoft or any other organization. This is a discussion to foster debate and by no means an enactment of policy-violation. These posts are provided "as-is" with no warranties and confer no rights. So chill. And think.